Your Blogging Staff

Contributing to this blog:
- "Dave" is Dave Barry, who is a humor columnist and presidential contender.
- "judi" is Judi Smith, who is Dave's Research Department, as well as being interested in men.
- "Walter" is Walter, a bone from the penis of a walrus.

Many thanks to all of those that have served. I haven't heard the term Decoration Day in a long time. My Grandparents called it that. My Dad didn't die during the war but had health issues from the war that took him at the age of 59. War changes people in many ways. Happy Holidays.

My Dad was a pilot for the Luftwaffe during WW2. He joined as a pilot because of an interest in and experience with aviation, his alternative being the certainty of being drafted as any infantryman. What he didn't know was that he was half-Jewish, as his father had done his best to conceal his Jewish origins, even to the point that his own children didn't know. In late1943, it came to light (it's own hideous story how) that his father was a Jew, and after an investigation by the Gestapo, my father was pulled from the Luftwaffe and placed under local house arrest, while his father got shipped to Auschwitz. My grandfather was enslaved at a nearby coal mine, and essentially worked to death. The Russian Army had liberated the camp in January 1945, but he died a month after that; he was evidently too sick to be forcibly marched away by the Nazis when they evacuated the camp and most of its inmates as the Russians approached.

As fhe war ended, my Dad was still alive. He emigrated to the USA in 1947, and brought my Mom over from Germany in 1950. Since he died when I was eight I never got to know from him what his wartime and post-war life was like, but I later learned that he chose the USA to emigrate to because of a profound gratitude for its values and freedoms, and a deep fear that any other place could quickly give rise to further horrors like those he had seen in his native land.

So, while he was a war veteran on the wrong side of that war, he came to know directly the meaning behind the sacrifice made by all US soldiers, dead and living, that we honor on Memorial Day.